News from numerous sources about the Levant countries: Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan

Syrian rebels launched a car bomb and detonated explosives inside a tank on Friday morning as part of a fresh offensive to break a siege on the divided city of Aleppo.

Rebels including Fateh al-Sham Front, the rebranded al-Nusra Front, also launched Grad rockets at the government-controlled Nairab air base, aiming to break the government siege of rebel-held areas of the city.

Rockets fired by rebels killed at least 15 civilians in government-held areas of the city on Friday morning, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said.

Sources on the ground told MEE that there were also “furious” clashes on the ground, with districts that were once far from the fighting now finding themselves on the front lines.

Residents said on Thursday that the street fighting was now so close to their homes that they could hear rebels trading insults with their foes.

Residents of eastern Aleppo – home to over 250,000 people and under siege for over three months – burned tires in the streets, sending thick plumes of smoke into the air and providing cover for rebel operations, an AFP correspondent said.

The start of the rebel assault was hailed by the loudspeakers of eastern Aleppo mosques on Friday morning.

“There is a general call-up for anyone who can bear arms,” a senior official in the Levant Front rebel group, which fights under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) banner, told Reuters. “The preparatory shelling started this morning,” he added.

Zakaria Malahifji, an official with the Fastaqim rebel group in Aleppo, said a number of factions would participate in the new offensive and that the bombardment of the air base was part of this.

“Today is supposed to be the launch of the battle,” Malahifji said. “All the rebel groups will participate.”

A spokesperson for Fateh al-Sham said the group had detonated a suicide car bomb at an eastern entrance to the city, with rebels also detonating explosives inside a tank in the Aleppo suburb of al-Assad.

The twin suicide blasts came after rebels from Ahrar al-Sham earlier detonated two car bombs in the city.

SOHR, a British-based monitoring group, said that Grad surface-to-surface rockets had also struck Nairab air base and locations around the Hmeimim air base, near Latakia.

Syria’s civil war, now in its sixth year, pits President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia, Iran and militias from Lebanon, against mostly Sunni rebels including groups supported by Turkey, Gulf monarchies and the United States.

Aleppo, Syria’s most populous city before the war, has for years been split between a government-held western sector and the rebel-held east, which the army and its allies managed to put under siege this summer.